Word: jacobys
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Branagh stumbles on his casting of Billy Crystal and Robin Williams as the First Gravedigger and Osric, respectively, but the generally strong cast more than makes up for this misjudgment. Claudius (Derek Jacobi) is subtly played, his motivation portrayed not in a devilish light, but more as ambition that has gotten in the way of morality. Horatio, always a difficult role to play, is handled deftly by Nicholas Farrell, who conveys the emotion of his part without over-emphasizing his relationship with Hamlet. Laertes, a role often overlooked in modern productions, is carefully played by Michael Maloney, who shows...
...Kenneth Branagh doesn?t win an Oscar for his four-hour, uncut ?Hamlet,? " says TIME's Richard Corliss, "he should at least cop a Chutzpah Award." Here's the most eclectic cast in movie history -- Julie Christie, Billy Crystal, Gerard Depardieu, John Gielgud, Rosemary Harris, Charlton Heston, Derek Jacobi, Jack Lemmon, John Mills, Robin Williams, Kate Winslet and the Duke of Marlborough, to name but a dozen -- in the second longest film released by a major studio (after ?Cleopatra?). To his credit, the actor-director-adapter approached this job not as a solemn duty or an egotistical stunt...
...considerably less hubbub than that heralding the upcoming Odyssey, went on to exceed all commercial expectations by selling 22,000 copies in hardback; the paperback version, now in its eighth printing, has moved 140,000 copies. And an abridged audiotape of the Iliad read by Derek Jacobi surprised Penguin Audiobooks by selling 35,000 copies...
...year he played Iago to Laurence Fishburne's Othello and made a film, A Midwinter's Tale, about doing Hamlet in the provinces. This year he directs and stars in Hamlet--every word of Shakespeare's longest play--and has cast it with nearly every tony Brit actor (Derek Jacobi, John Gielgud, Kate Winslet, Rosemary Harris) but Emma Thompson. There are also some ringers: Robin Williams, Jack Lemmon and Billy Crystal. How do you say shtick in Elizabethan English...
Branagh deftly plays with the intersection of art, cinema and the theater. He opens the movie with our narrator, Derck Jacobi, playing the role of the chorus. He lights a match and by doing so invokes the predominant motif of fire, which flickers throughout the darkness of the film. In his shady-looking black trenchcoat, he them saunters across the set of the movie, surrounded by cameras, sets and lights--all the contraptions of film-making. We are clearly made accomplices to the fact that this is a constructed story. Rather than allow us to be lulled by the illusions...